


planting seeds in a garden you never get to see

by gooseontheloose



Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Drabble, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Tumblr Prompt, i guess idk
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-25
Updated: 2019-04-25
Packaged: 2020-01-31 18:38:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18597127
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gooseontheloose/pseuds/gooseontheloose
Summary: Sometimes I steal flowers from your garden on my way to the cemetery, but today you've caught me and have demanded to come with me and make sure that 'the girl is pretty enough to warrant flower theft' and I'm trying to figure out how to break it to you that we're on our way to the graveyard.





	planting seeds in a garden you never get to see

John' mother kissed him the head before she left. She didn’t say anything out of the ordinary. Anything that felt like a last goodbye. She just smoothed his already perfect hair, and smiled softly. Then she was gone.

Little things remind him of her, of what could’ve been. The summer rain, warm against his golden skin reminds him of her gentle fingertips brushing against his arm. The purple thunderclouds remind him of that look she got in her eyes right before she yelled at him. The peeling red paint of the door on their new house reminds him of the raw skin on her hands, scrubbed fifty times to rid them of dirt that was never there. If he squinted slightly, the flowers in the garden could’ve been her, swaying to music that only she heard, her sundress spinning in some far off sea breeze.

When the flowers started going missing, he almost laughed. It seemed like one of life’s great ironies. Flowers that symbolised his mother, leaving him just like she did.

His father doesn’t care. He’s too apathetic. Last time John so much as mentioned his flowers, Henry stared at him with those narrowed eyes, and said, “Flowers are for faggots and little girls. You aren’t either of those things. Grow up Jack.”

And John would try not to flinch because he didn’t want his father to say that word again. Try not to flinch because flowers don’t make you gay. Try not to flinch because he doesn’t want to be gay. Try not to flinch because he can’t help it, and he wants his father to love him. But Henry Laurens would never love a faggot like him.

So he keeps the matter of the disappearing flowers to himself. Tries to brush it off. But it kept happening.

It wasn’t a dog or a wild animal. The stems were always cleanly snapped, as those the flowers were taken with care and precision. He knows it’s stupid, childish even, to be obsessing over some plants, but he does it anyway. It’s something to pass the time.

He tells his little sister Martha, and she tells him, in her condescending thirteen year old voice, that he needs to get some friends, and that when she’s fifteen, she’ll have actual hobbies. He rolled his eyes and wandered off, trying not to let her light-hearted joke sting. He knows that he needs to get some friends. Aaron Burr doesn’t count. Sometimes John wonders if Burr even counts as a person.

It’s three weeks after he first noticed the flowers going missing that it happens. He’s at home at 3.15, because walking directly from school to your house is exactly the kind of thing a person with no friends does. That’s when he sees the figure, crouched next to their back wall, snatching at the plants with nimble fingers.

The first thing that goes through his head is that he was right. The second thing is “what the fuck, what kind of a person breaks into someone’s garden to take their fucking flowers.”

“Who are you?”

The figure freezes, then slowly turns to face him.

John is greeted by soft brown eyes, cracked lips, and hollow cheeks, framed with long wispy hair.

His heart skips a beat. Shit. This always happens when there’s a cute boy within 100 metres of him. He needs to get a freaking grip.

“I said who are you?”

The other boy doesn’t respond. He just turns his head, staring off behind him, with a glassy unfocused expression.

“Je ne comprends pas ce que tu me dis en ce moment, mais je suis juste accroupie devant un mur, occupant mes propres affaires.” Says the boy, with a slight shrug.

“Oh”, John stares at the boy for a long moment, trying to figure out what any of that means. He draws a blank. He never really listened in French class. John wracks his brain, then manages a single word “qui?” He really hopes that means who.

The boy’s face breaks into a grin. “Oh I really had you there huh?”

“What?”

“The whole ‘no hablo ingles’ thing. I really got you.”

John just stares at him, trying to wrap his head around what the hell is actually happening.

 “Who are you?” he repeats the question, and the boy’s smile falls.

He’s realised that John doesn’t see the funny side of this whole thing. He stiffens slightly, blinking slowly, and tightening his clenched fist around the flowers. The petals crinkle as the crush against each other. John watches with morbid fascination.

He shouldn’t care. He doesn’t care about the flowers, not really. He just likes watching things grow. Likes watching them bloom, then slowly wilt and shrivel into nothing. It seems like an apt metaphor for humanity. For the fragility and impermanence of human existence.

“Alexander.” Says the boy after a long moment. “Alexander Hamilton.”

“Okay Alexander, care to explain what you are doing in my garden, stealing my flowers?”

Alexander’s ears redden slightly, as he scrapes his scuffed shoes against the ground. John doesn’t think he’s getting an answer.

“Like, are you just taking them and putting them in a vase? Are you giving them to somebody?”

Alexander makes a stifled sound in the back of this throat.

“Who?”

No reply.

“Well I’m coming with you.” John declares. It’s not like he has anything better to do. “Let’s see if the receiver of all of my stolen flowers is worthy.”

Alexander doesn’t protest. He just sighs, and picks his ratty rucksack off the ground.

He leads John out of the garden, and John feels his heart pounding in his chest. This might be the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to him. Following stranger to god knows where, all because of some stolen plants. He really does need friends.

-

When they round the gate to the Church yard, they still haven’t spoken another word to each other, and John can taste bile in the back of his throat.

Because shit. This kid, Alexander Hamilton, was stealing flowers to put on a grave.

A grave of a dead person. A person who is dead, who Alexander probably loved.

John’s never felt like a bigger asshole in his life.

It gets worse, if that’s even possible.

Alexander leads him away from the headstones, to a secluded corner, shaded by a willow tree.

He sits down on the grass, and John sees it.

The grass is long, it hasn’t been mown here in a while. The blades are so tall that they almost hide it completely. A small white stone, with slanted sharpie writing, a name and date. Alexander brushes his fingers reverently over the ‘grave’, seemingly forgetting that John is there. There’s a rosary, pooled up, the beads dulled with age. John wonders how many times someone brushed their fingers over them, whispered a soft prayer. Alexander carries on talking to the stone, carefully laying the flowers down next to it.

“I—“

Alexander turns to face him, with this utterly broken look in his eyes. John doesn’t think that he’s ever seen anyone look so vulnerable before.

“They wouldn’t let me get a grave stone. I couldn’t afford one anyway. She’s buried back on the Island, but I need to remember her here. I need her to be here. I just need my Mama”

He runs a finger down the stem of one of the flowers.

“White tulips were her favourite. We could never afford them, but she loved all flowers. She used to braid them into her hair. I—They just remind me of her. I’ll stop. I’m sorry.”

“No. You can take them if you want.”

Alexander sighs softly, and stares into the distance. “Don’t pity me. I don’t need you to pity me.”

John wonders if he knows how hard it is not to pity him, with his handmade gravestone, and second hand clothes, and that look in his eyes like he’s fragments of a whole.

“I don’t.” John tries to reassure him. He wonders if he should tell Alexander that he lost his mother too, that even though she’s alive, and out there somewhere, she’s not the woman he remembers, not the woman he recognises.

He wonders if Alexander pities him right back. The boy who followed some stranger to a graveyard, who clearly has nothing better to do with his time than obsess over plants. The boy who seems to struggle with basic human interaction.

“I never asked your name.”

“It’s John. John Laurens.”

“John”. Alexander repeats with the smallest of smiles. He likes the way it sounds on his tongue. “Would you like to sit?”

John smiles back, mirroring the nervous gesture.

It feels like he might have made a friend today.

Stranger things have happened.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Um we 
> 
>  
> 
> feedback appreciated


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